I had some really trippy techno music dubbed over the video, though the version I uploaded has no audio...I recommend playing something in the background ;-D

As you might be able to tell from that preview image I've done some work on the sun / sky / fog setup. The sun's line-of-sight is calculated every frame, and I render the sun in two stages...the 'brighter' bloom gets faded out if the sun's view is obstructed.

Here is another screenshot of the new sun at various times of day...

Also the city shown in these screenshots is new...this city is called 'Suburbia' a large portion of the map consists of residential areas.

In addition to working on a new city, and finalizing the sun/sky rendering...I've been putting a lot of hours on the netcode. I made a huge advance, fixing a server-side slowdown bug that has been nagging me since the netcode re-write. I had some poorly designed code that was brining the server-side FPS down to ~20 w/ 6 clients no matter what...I fixed the issue, and now a game server should be able to maintain 100+ FPS easily with 6 clients connected. I'm very happy about that.

Also I've been working on adding collision detection + reaction between bullets and vehicles/streetside objects. I'll have some more interesting footage of this soon enough, I just have to finish adding 'sparks' to the particle engine. I have 90% coded up the ability to add bullet holes on vehicles...but some problems come up, when the damage models + animated doors / trunks come into play, so I scrapped it.

Speaking of animated vehicle doors/trunks...that was one thing I recently added back into the game, in preparation for adding drive-by shootings, which are coming along nicely. Also you can now switch between any of the seats in your current vehicle. If you're not driving, you can shoot out of the car.

Lets see what else...I've mostly just been cleaning things up. I say it all the time, but I need to post more frequent updates :-) I hate cramming lots of stuff into a single entry...

Anyways, here are some of the latest screenies...these are all from the new city I'm working on...there is no variety in the houses...I only have one house model created right now. I'm going to crank out a few of them tommorow.

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Guest Anonymous Poster

Very very impressive! One minor thing: I think that it looks better when the glasses of the building reflect the sun, a specular highlight with a large exponent (the m_shi thing iirc) on it should be enough, isn't it? And one minor thing that is technically probably not so minor (due to lightmaps, iirc): it would be cool when the lights get turned on with random delays... :D

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Ravuya - Yup, on bullet impact w/vehicles+objects I do physics, sparks, sounds, and I was going to do decals, but I had to scrap that :-/ Instead of spawning sparks when you shoot a car's window I'll spawn pieces of glass. I think I'm going to try 1 more time with decals though, it would look awesome to see a line of bullet holes raked across your vehicle after driving through enemy territory [grin].

AP - Yea I've been thinking aobut a way to randomly turn on the window lights...It would have to modulated at the building level, and I would have to add some stuff to the shader to modulate it in real-time based off some per-vertex 'seed value'...it would be a bitch but I can see it making the transition from dusk -> night look even better. As far as just using a specular on the windows, it wouldn't help solve the problem of the windows not standing out when a entire side of a building is shadowed. Having the windows so reflective helps break up the building's darkness. The specular only applies to un-shadowed verts.